Margaret Thatcher Projects Opens LOGICAL EXPRESSIONS AND VARIATIONS Today

Margaret Thatcher Projects presents Logical Expressions and Variations, a group show including works by 4 Contemporary artists who each incorporate the logical, rational and at times accidental reading of visual data by automated or organic systems in their artwork. In the processes of these artists there is a clear interest and idea that our contemporary lifestyle is no longer about digesting information through our sensors alone, but with the guidelines of technological advances at our hands as well.

Logical Expressions and Variations will open today, May 9th and will remain on view through Saturday, June 8th, 2013.

Starting with digital photographs, William Betts' scenes of leisure are filtered through multiple layers of technological intervention. Betts' photographs are reorganized into pixels on a grid using his own proprietary software, then printed as a series of dots using a retrofitted CNC machine that ejects acrylic paint though a pneumatic valve. The perfectly uniform droplets of paint produce an image that feels familiar from afar, but abstracted and alien up close.

Julie Oppermann offers an intense visual experience maximizing moire patterns with contrasting colors that flicker and pulsate. Her paintings realize that perception can be deceiving, setting digital visualization against man-made optical illusion with flat surfaces that appear to vibrate and reference our ambiguous "it's complicated" relationship with technology.

Photographing famed public parks from around the world, including Central Park (New York) and Hyde Park (Sydney),Gary Carsley is interested in the fiction behind man made "natural" landscapes. Returning to his photographs, Carsley digitally repaints areas of color with patterns from faux wood grain contact adhesive paper, adding yet another layer of "fiction" upon his work while evoking a sense of "painting by numbers. The inclusion of Ikea furniture wrapped in his photographic print add yet another layer to this charade with furniture built from composite wood.

Using molecular modeling and multiple a 3D-printers, Shane Hope directs the formation of objects with shapes reminiscent of a diverse under water terrain from digital inception to physical product. The shapes are determined by the computer's automatic decision-making process based on selected algorithmic formulae. Their resulting similarity to natural systems are uncanny, drawing a connection between Hope's algorithms and the geometric principles behind our natural landscape. This emulated and remade product, which readily pronounces its synthetic origins, ultimately asks the viewer questions regarding the fast developing and increasingly consumer friendly possibilities of customizable production based on the technology to produce from the atom up.

Margaret Thatcher Projects is located at 539 West 23rd Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10 am to 6 pm. For further information, contact the gallery at: info@thatcherprojects.com, call 212.675.0222, or visit www.thatcherprojects.com.

Artwork: Shane Hope, Femtofacturin' Fluidentifried-Fleshionistas, 2012, 3D-printed PLA molecular models on acrylic substrate, 24 x 24 cm (61 x 61 cm)